To clarify "cognition outside of language" and "unable to convey"... did it purely affect external communication? Were you able to think "in language"? Do you tend to rely on thinking "in language" (whether inner monologue, describing problems like drafting prose, or otherwise)?
To get retrospectively nerdy, it felt like switching from a raw text based lookup system to a knowledge graph / vector search.
Instead of accessing memories / concepts at a raw text level, I was pulling up lots of metadata and making links to these fusiform concepts that it was invoking. I would then try to find the words to describe what the links were conveying.